by Joan Silber
We toodle-ooed out of there, and when we got home, I told my mother I’d seen Toby. “He is the smartest boy,” she said. “Well, smart man now.”
I was thinking of Mr. Llewellyn’s physical science class in high school, when he talked about the Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer and the geniuses who worked on the atomic bomb. After Hiroshima, Oppenheimer said, “The physicists have known sin.” I thought that Toby was in a spot like that now.
At the end of the week I drove back to Miami with Phoebe in the car. We got stuck in traffic on the Seven-Mile Bridge, and the glare on the water made my neck ache. What an idiot girl I was for having had dirty thoughts about Toby. I felt immensely stupid. The world wasn’t all sex, was it? Toby was in a different part of history, too horrified to be much interested in titillation.
And what did I want from Toby anyway? Nothing really, which was sort of insulting to him. Would I have swooned with helpless feeling, just out of etiquette, if he’d been interested? Did I have an honest bone left in my body? My itchiness could turn me into a joke, a horny housewife in a blue movie. If I’d known something else to want, I would have wanted it. When we got home and Doug came out to the car to greet us, I stood up and pressed my body against him full-tilt, I wound my snaky arms around him. “Whoa, girl,” he said.
WE MIGHT HAVE GONE on like this even longer than we did. For a year or so I was an old-fashioned spouse, pretty and hardworking and sour, a good cook and a sarcastic laugher. But then Phoebe went through a pain-in-the-ass phase. She didn’t like the color of her Jell-O and threw the dish at me, she wasn’t going to wear that stupid jacket and stomped it. When I wanted to read a book in another room while she had her nap, she bellowed, “Not going. You have to stay here.” She grabbed my bare shin with her tiny fierce hands, she went limp when I tried to peel her off. I whacked her hard on the arm to make her let go, a smack with some noise in it.
For a second we were both stunned. Then Phoebe, who had been yowling, yowled louder, as if this were the very thing she was expecting, though I had never hit her before—who hits a two-and-a-half-year-old? “No more,” I said, “no more, now.” I didn’t know which of us I was pleading with. She wouldn’t let me comfort her (I couldn’t blame her), and I sat in the room while she sobbed in outrage. It ended with her falling into a curled sleep on the floor. I didn’t try to move her.
I hadn’t really hurt her or raised a mark on her milky skin, but I was properly alarmed. I hated motherhood for what it had shown me to be. I was sorry I’d had her, sorry for what I now knew. How in love with myself I had once been. What scared me most now was my future.
In a logic that seemed simple to me at the time, I saw that I had to leave Doug and take Phoebe with me. We could go to my family. I didn’t want to sneak out either, to act afraid of my husband. Doug said, “Oh, please. You have no brains, girl. What do you want really? Just tell me. You don’t even know, do you?”
It was June when I got to Key West, a very hot month. My mother said, “Oh, absence will make his heart grow fonder.” She thought Doug had thrown me out. Each time he telephoned, she winked at me with satisfaction. “Will you cut this crap and get yourself home already?” he said. “I’ve had enough.” Worst was when he tried cajoling. “Have you forgotten everything, baby?” he said. I was touched to hear this, ready to say something lovey back; I could feel the white lies swelling up in my throat, the beautiful utterances. How could I turn my back on beauty? I did, but I felt perverse and grim, a pigheaded sulker.
I STAYED THE WHOLE summer in Key West, trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, a season long enough for Doug to find someone else. Who was she? “No one you know,” he said. I cried when he told me, right on the phone with him. It was one of my lowest moments. What a dog in the manger I was.
But I saw it was time to move. I rented a tiny stucco hut of a house, and to my family’s high disapproval I got a job waiting tables at night in a seafood restaurant near the ocean. Doug sent money when he felt like it and talked about coming to visit Phoebe (this didn’t happen for months). I made friends at the laundromat near the beach. After midnight was prime laundry time. Around the machines there’d be other single moms, who were often girls I knew from high school, and there’d be a Cuban grandmother, a couple of bikers, a few hard-luck guys who owned fishing boats.
It was from Gina, who’d been in my science class, that I heard about the glories of travel. She was a skinny, pretty woman with frizzball hair and a hoarse, breathless voice. She had been to Thailand and was thinking about India or Mexico. “It’s in my idea of a complete life,” she said.
I had at that point a broken life. I had willed the break, but I did feel that something alive had been cut. “In other parts of the world,” Gina said, “a washing machine would be like some mysterious box landed from the moon. There are more riffs on being human than we think. Like in Thailand it’s rude to touch somebody’s head, the head is sacred. If you don’t go anywhere, you think your own way is the whole thing.”
“Did you have Emmy with you in Thailand?” I asked. Emmy was her five-year-old.
“Of course. People are nice to kids. Well, the Thai were. And that slow-as-molasses thing that kids do of noticing every blade of grass is what you’re traveling for anyway. That was my theory.”
In the daytime Gina and I sometimes took our kids to the beach and hung out drinking beer with one of the bikers, who was really not a bad guy. He’d once been an organizer for the hospital workers’ union and he liked me because I’d picketed in college. I’d always loved the beach on the Gulf side, the long white curve of land and the rippling shelf of watery blue. “I hear you’re going to Mexico with Gina,” he said, while she was in the surf with Emmy.
I had probably expressed this as a passing whim. I did not think I was a traveler: I liked my comfort, I was not always brave, and I was only just starting to be curious. “Claro,” I said to the biker. “Sí, sí. You bet.” I was kidding. Our whole purpose in sitting on the beach was to kid around.
“It’s very wild there. You ready, girl?” he said. “It’s a great country. Only watch your back.”
AND I DID GO with Gina, much to my own amazement. My parents weren’t happy. And Doug said, “You’re a fucking nutcase,” when he heard the plan, but he’d been too neglectful of Phoebe to get carried away about stopping me. I had a little cash saved from my tips—everybody told me how cheap Mexico was—and I sublet my house at a profit for the few months I thought I’d be gone.
We hit the road in Gina’s VW bus. The girls were excited when we first took off. Emmy treated Phoebe like a big doll, bouncing her on her lap and carting her around at rest stops; Phoebe’s face was sappy with delight. By the end of the day they were always ragged and quarrelsome, and whoever wasn’t driving had to make up games and coddle them like babies. At night we all slept in the back of the van, which was covered with quilts and strewn with sleeping bags. I don’t know why we thought we were safe, pulled off the highway in the buzzing dark, with the lights of cars going past us all night. But I loved the tight little unit we were. I didn’t even know Gina that well, and here we were, singing made-up songs to the girls (“On top of old BACK seat, all covered with potato chips”) and snorting over each other’s stories about men.
It satisfied us immensely that we could do all this on almost no money. Peanut butter sandwiches and juice in the cooler, gas and tolls, the occasional beer and candy bar—what else did we need? Why had we ever thought we needed more? We were slipping out of the pointless wants that made everyone around us fat and greedy and miserable, we were speeding off to a freedom that had been there all along. We could not help being pleased with ourselves.
At Brownsville we crossed the muddy waters of the Rio Grande, cheering and hooting, and handed our tourist visas to the unsmiling Mexican officials. We had to keep driving until we got to this one great town in Chiapas that someone had told Gina about. We drove on twisting roads with viny forest on both sides and clo
ying heat misting our skin, and then suddenly the car was climbing into cool mountain spaces, and in a dip among these mountains was San Cristóbal de las Casas. I had a sudden wash of gratitude as we chugged into it, our rickety van huge on its streets. The houses were adobe, chalky white and pale yellow and sandy peach, with roofs of brownish tiles, and at the end of its cobbled streets a row of mountains loomed in the distance, ringed by wisps of clouds. The air smelled deliciously of pine smoke.
AND WE WERE rich here too. Within a week, just from hanging out in the town square in front of the baroque stone church, and from going to the fabulous town market, where Indians descended from Mayans stood selling piles of beans and peppers and parched corn, we’d made friends with some of the other Americans—Robin and Anthony and Howie and Fran and Fritz and Sue-Anne and a slew of others. They told us what to do, and we found a house with three rooms and a central courtyard for twenty-five dollars a month. The kids could play in the courtyard, while Gina and I, who had taken to calling ourselves the pioneer mothers, cooked meals on a brazier made from an oil drum or built a fire under the bottom of the tank that fed hot water to the shower.
I had never had much of a bent toward simplicity—I was too proud of the quirks and complications of my own civilized personality—but now I walked out every day to an older human history than I’d bothered to think about before. On our street at dawn men and women and children who’d walked miles from their villages made their slow way up the hill to the market, with sisal bags of vegetables or charcoal carried on tumplines across their foreheads. The men wore basic T-shaped tunics, the women wore embroidered blouses and long skirts. After a while I could distinguish the Chamulas from the Zinacántecos from the Tenejapas from the ones from Amatenango del Valle.
The other gringos came to hang out at our house—at any moment Anthony or Robin or Fritz might be at the door—and Gina had one or two flirtations going, but I did not. I was okay with this, for perhaps the first time in my life. I had other avenues of interest here, other things I craved. I could not quite get over the things people made here; I had already bought a shawl, a hammock of multicolored cotton net, a dark blue skirt that wrapped under a beautiful red-and-green-striped belt, and a heavy white cotton blouse with deep red and golden yellow satin-stitching on the bodice.
Gina had decided she wanted to learn backstrap weaving, and we went together to a Tenejapa woman who coached her in making, inch by inch, a wide strip of thickly bright cotton brocade. I kept an eye on the girls, who chased around the yard with the woman’s two kids. María, who’d taught other gringas, had lived away from her Tenejapa village for ten years, so she had some Spanish. She was not much older than we were, and sometimes she giggled with us. She had a lovely, calm face. She taught Phoebe to wind yarn on a spool and called her Cho’oh, which meant Mouse in Tzeltal, her own language.
GINA SOMETIMES TEASED ME about my growing wardrobe of local textiles. I knew that I was only pretending, walking around in my primitive smocks, lighting our kitchen fires with ocote, the local pitch pine: as if I weren’t wearing bikini undies made of polyester, as if I’d never seen a toaster or a refrigerator. But I was pretending like any novitiate in her robe, with the hope that mimicry could take me closer to something worth knowing.
Sometimes the shopkeepers would snicker to each other when they saw me. And once a cop—one of the grim, heavily armed federales—pulled at the end of my woven belt as if it were a tail. His leering amusement spooked me.
We went a few times a week to visit María, who would open the door very glad to see us. She had been married to a ladino, a non-Indian local, but it had not worked out. That was all we knew. She had a boy a little older than Phoebe and a girl who was Emmy’s age. I asked María if she ever went home but I never quite got a straight answer. A sore subject, maybe. “I ran away,” she said, “to be married.”
“My mother always loathed my ex,” Gina said. “She had a point.”
The term “ex” had to be explained to María in our lousy high school Spanish. “Mr. X-Y-Z, no more name, that’s funny,” she said.
“They fall off the end of the alphabet, those guys,” I said. I was thinking about María fleeing her village in the night, all that trouble and now no husband.
“Your parents took it hard when you picked this person?” Gina said. “Mine too.”
“They don’t like anyone but Tenejapa.”
Gina said that was kind of narrow thinking.
“They know what they know,” María said. “From their lives. When my father was a young man, he worked for a patrón who went twice a year between his ranch and the city, a long ride on a horse in the mountains. No highways then, no trucks. Very rocky, maybe four, five days. The wife rode in a chair strapped to my father’s back.”
Phoebe had heard the word for chair, one of the few words she knew in Spanish, and she ran around the room yelling, “La silla! La silla!”
Gina and I were silent, perhaps both hoping we hadn’t heard right. I felt then how kind María was to us, us outsiders with our shallow and interesting conversation, our coins for her teaching, our blurting enthusiasms, our visits when we felt like it.
THE WEATHER GOT COOLER, but even in October I liked the evenings in our little house, when we sat on cushions in the courtyard, with candles and kerosene lanterns around us, and feasted on some elaborate combo of vegetables we had cooked. The girls liked to nestle in the hammock and use it like a swing. Phoebe liked to tell over and over which stalls we’d visited in the market—“The frijoles lady! The frijoles lady!”—which favorite café we’d stopped in for banana-strawberry licuados and slices of cake. Emmy paraded around in all the necklaces I had bought. Gina would say, “You think we should drive to a beach or to the ruins at Palenque or do we just want to stay put?” What lolling, royal lives we had there, we who were, after all, a waitress and a welfare mother.
Fritz, who’d been eyeing Gina for a while, came by one night with a new rumor. An American guy—no one we knew—had had a loud argument in a bakery because he thought the woman was cheating him. “Know what the bakery woman did?” Fritz said. “She had him arrested. How could she do that?”
“The shopkeepers don’t like us because we’re so cheap,” I said. “And we don’t work either. They don’t get it.”
The next day when Phoebe and I showed up at our favorite café, there was a cardboard sign over the glass-covered counter where they kept the pastries-NO HIPIS ALLOWED.
We were already inside—if I tried to drag Phoebe out, she’d squall. There was no excuse I could give her that wouldn’t make her shriek to high heaven. So we sat down, and when we gave our order, the owner pointed to the sign. “Not us,” I said in my bad Spanish. “It doesn’t mean us. We are not hipis.” The owner, a heavy-featured matron who’d always been friendly enough, walked away. I didn’t know what to do, so I waited. “I’m so hungry,” Phoebe said.
I was trying not to catch the eye of the Mexican customers. I was about to tell Phoebe we had to give up when the owner came to the table with two pieces of chocolate cake for us. Phoebe banged her fork on her plate in excitement. “Will you stop, please?” I said. “Could you, please?”
She ate her cake with her hands, very, very slowly, with the tiniest of bites. She knew something was up. “Ummy yummy yummy,” she said to me in happy spite, licking her fingers.
If I told her to hurry, she would only take longer on purpose. Why did I have a kid like this? How could I have a kid like this in a place like Chiapas?
THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY when we got back. Emmy and Gina had gone to the waterfall with Fritz. I felt a little lonely. I got Phoebe to nap with me on the quilt in our room. I was dreaming about the beach at home when a banging sound woke me up. It took me a minute to know someone was pounding at the door.
People without kids never had any idea when naptime was. It was kind of annoying. “I’m coming,” I yelled. When I unlatched the door, a policeman in khaki stood before me, one of the federales, a man w
ith pocked skin and a black leather holster.
“Where is your husband?” he said.
“He’s away but he might be back soon.”
“You have no husband,” he said, and he stepped inside and closed the door.
“My daughter is asleep,” I said.
“Where is your marijuana?”
“I don’t smoke marijuana,” I said.
“I am going to look for your marijuana.”
“Nothing is here,” I said. There was probably some in Gina’s room. “Please don’t wake up my daughter. She’s only three. Almost four. Do you have children?”
He gave me a long stare, and he put his hand over my breast. “Do you still nurse your daughter?”
“No,” I said. “Yes. Sometimes.”
“Will you give me milk if I want it?” He was squeezing my nipple through the embroidered blouse.
“Please go away,” I said. I was afraid to push him or to move. His fingers were pinching me. “I think you should go away. Please. My daughter is sleeping.” A tiny, wretched spill of liquid seeped through my blouse. My body was in collusion.
He stood like that, with his curled palm clenching me—perhaps he was deciding. He could do this or he could do that. He could do whatever he wanted.
“Tell the others I was here,” he said. “Tell your many husbands.” He turned and opened the door and then he was gone.
GINA AND FRITZ AND EMMY came back very giddy and loud from their trip to the waterfall. “Hello, campers,” I said. I didn’t tell them. I had the indignant idea that they would not quite understand. I went to bed early so I could lie down and regard my terror in peace. I had not thought that I was in a place where I was hated. Poor people had reasons to hate us, in our well-fed idleness, but the cop was not poor. All the same, I had outraged him. In my huipil with its bodice of embroidered flowers I was like Marie Antoinette in her shepherdess costume to him. I was oozing money, and his country was a hobby to me.